Somalia burns :

The solution to the developing crisis in Somalia may be found several hundred miles to the north, on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. To prevent these two countries from further entangling themselves in the Somali civil war, the US and the UN should renew their attempts to resolve a long-standing border dispute.

In Somalia, the Islamic movement centered on Mogadishu is moving against the fragile interim government, which holds little else besides the town of Baidoa. Ethiopia, worried about Islamic influence, has dispatched troops and tanks to help the government, and Eritrea has sent in military advisers to the Islamic forces. The US has a legitimate concern that Somalia not become a terrorist base, but this goal is hardly advanced by support for Ethiopian intervention. The US should tell the Ethiopians to pull back. That would be a precondition for the terrorism the US wants to prevent. Resolving the Eritrean-Ethiopia conflict will not be easy, but it is far more clear-cut than the complex inter-clan disputes that divide Somalia, as the US discovered when it intervened there on humanitarian gro-unds in 1992. Beyond offers of UN mediation, outsiders should leave the Somalis to their own devices, as long as they do not harbour terrorists. — The New York Times